


Cherish

by yeoltidecarol



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Light Angst, Romance, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 19:59:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18676429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeoltidecarol/pseuds/yeoltidecarol
Summary: When you met Minseok at a wedding, you did not think you could swoon for a man quite so hard. But like the world, he is cyclical, and so you ruminate on all the ways he proves you wrong.





	Cherish

The day you met him, you thought you could not love him any more than this. 

Much unlike you and, surely, impossible, the sight of him made your heart stumble in his rhythm, tripping over the elegance of his hair, his jaw, his neck. Off to the side of the dance floor and holding a flute of champagne with the same care he’d give to a lover, he was talking. He was talking, lips moving and shaping words as though each deserved a kiss as they passed along his tongue, and you were surrendering to a minute state of mourning that you could not hear his voice. He was talking, and the world around you was changing. 

For a moment, you thought maybe it was changing for worse, because to become unhinged at the sight of a man in a tailored grey suit certainly must mean danger. For a moment, you thought maybe it was changing without your permission, wings of longing emerging from your back, like branches, rounding up and over to reach for him - to cage him in your lust and to never let him turn from you again. For a moment you thought, _he is a volatile, threatening thing, and to love him like this is the start of my unraveling._

For a moment, you thought the change was because you were needy. Weddings did that, you knew, turned men and women, often comfortable in their loneliness, into hungry, persistent things. And as much as you knew the transformation was swift and reckless, you knew the shades of this type of chaos rarely lasted past morning. Weddings did that, made love a thing to be consumed rather than nurtured, turned envy into rapture and made one night spread into an unattainable eternity.

Weddings, you thought, were fraught with celebration of possibilities, and too many were pushed beyond their expiration. 

But then he laughed.

He laughed and, truthfully, you cannot recall who was standing beside him, because he was an act of reduction; a paradox that made the world impossibly finite and impossibly limitless. You cannot recall who stood beside him, because the insignificance of everything else was erased by the confrontation of something, someone, impossible. 

Because, as though you had been waiting, as though you knew, as though you had prepared, the whole of your existence seemed to amount to this moment. 

The reception hall was loud, crowded, yet over the DJ and the shrill laughter of the woman beside you, you could hear him. Low, musical - melody that made your blood burn, written and rewritten by the stars and meant only for you. It slid down your back, a torrent of yearning that made your spine arch and your mouth water - delivering you well beyond desire into the arms of need.

And when he looked at you. 

_When he looked at you…_

He looked at you, and his fingers gripped the base of his champagne flute just a little tighter, affected but stoic in the way he delivered himself to paradise. 

He looked at you and he exhaled, as though he were making room to breathe you in. As though he had been experiencing an endless missing, long since comfortable in the way emptiness makes a man feel consumed and, all at once, preparing to unmake himself, ready to be run raw.

He looked at you, and he smiled, knowing. There were secrets buried beneath the warmth of his cheeks, as though he too had been waiting, as though he felt you. As though he needed you, too.

He smiled, and you, already so far gone in your wanting and craving, thought you would not survive this. You would not survive _him,_ and, for this destruction, you were glad. You hoped you would not recognize yourself when he was through. 

~~~~

The night he kissed you, you thought you could not love him any more than this. 

Summer in the city was hot, the thick air making it hard to breathe, but, for you, the suffering was worth it because he was holding your hand. Long, delicate fingers entwined with yours, skin touching and burning as though separation surely meant death. Sweat was building between your palms, but neither of you cared. 

Not truly. Not when it meant that you would carry each other home, bathed in residue. 

For you, it was a flood. For you, it was an outpouring of all your longing, bursting from your skin to wash against his in an act of cleansing. 

Your living room was an oasis of air conditioning, raising goosebumps along your skin and creating a map of all the uncharted places you wanted him to touch. Along his hairline, the sweat dried and made him glimmer, glowing in a human way that made your chest ache.. Sheepishly, he apologized for the state of his appearance, vulnerable and shy, and quiet in the way he hoped you would still want him. 

Instead you called him the sun, defining yourself as the horizon on which he would never set.

It was easy to see he was nervous, but, then, so were you. He looked at the floor while you looked at him, admiring how his lip curved upward in the effort of keeping himself still, holding back from kissing and kissing and kissing you. He looked at the floor while you looked at him, heart racing at the sight of his long eyelashes, the way his speeding thoughts made his eyes dart around the carpet, mind struggling to catch just one. 

He looked at you while you looked at him, and only then were you able to truly feel gravity. 

You came together naturally, slowly, gently - a kinetic reaction to the build up of affection that finally pulled you into each other’s arms. Swollen with it, filled to the brim and unable to keep it in your chest any longer, you sighed into his open, eager mouth, and found yourself trembling at the wetness of his tongue. 

It was short, brief enough to feel as though he hadn’t been there at all. With a finger pressed against your lips, you watched the threads of his seams come partly undone, his face morphing into a profound affection; basking in the misery of your separation with an unbridled thirst, before he turned from you with a soft goodnight, and left. 

His hand on your cheek as he spoke did not linger, fearing what it would mean if he let himself stay.

You went to bed that night hot, feeling the phantom limb of his skin against yours, and moving against the fabric of your sheets as though it was his hands sliding against your hips. 

~~~~

The night he told you he loved you, you thought you could not love him more than this. 

It was not a special night. By all rights, it was a night that should have faded into the distance, the conclusion to a day that had your permission to blur seamlessly into an endless, unnumbered infinity. This evening should have slipped, bending and shaping itself as it crawled away, to nothing more than the mere acknowledgement that _I was with him and we were happy._

On this evening, you were cooking, hands gracefully cutting vegetables and turning meat - pausing only to sip your wine and look out the window of your kitchen. It was raining and the world was at peace with this cleansing, sun already set but sky not yet ready to be dark. It was raining, and so you should have seen his reflection as he approached from behind, but instead you surrendered to the shock of his arms around your waist, reclining back into him with a small, content smile. 

In his arms, you felt a great undoing overcome you - the undoing of what it truly meant to be stable, secure, and hopeful. Home, for you, had never been a transient thing, your world colors by rules and laws through which it became easy to relate. Home is not a thing that has the opportunity to leave, not of its own volition, not by its own choice. 

And so, in his arms, the shift of your definition was nothing short of unprecedented. In his arms, you felt the whole of the cosmos burst through you, erupting in your heart and turning it into a cauldron that made nothing but a love for him. You should have been surprised, you should have been alarmed, but it was him - your Minseok - and he was always so good at kissing your expectations full. There was a power to this love, driven to the brink of your affection and devotion as though to the edge of the universe, and your body did little else but birth stars of interstellar craving just for him. 

There was no reason to speak, not really. From his chest into your back, you could feel the steady rhythm of his heart, radiating endearment into your muscles and easing away all the tension carried within. So often, this was how he loved you, silently and with the whole of his soul. So often, this was how he loved you, confident in the acceptance of his feelings and willing to be soft, weak, and malleable only for you. 

‘I love you,’ he whispered into your ear, dragging his nose around the shell before resting in your hair. He inhaled, deep and full, taking you in and keeping you inside him until surviving only on you caused him pain, forcing him to exhale slowly. 

‘I love you, too’ you said, meeting his eyes in his reflection. 

You knew he didn’t need you to say it, but you thought it only fair you let the half formed image of him, blurred and smeared from rain, know that even this broken image of him was enough to command your will. 

~~~~

The night after your first argument, you thought you couldn’t love him any more than this. 

You had barely opened the door before he was at you, mouth clamped over yours and hands fisting in your hair. Conversation and platitudes died on your tongue, choosing instead to surrender to the need of having him around you, inside you, beneath and beside you, for always. Every inch of your chemistry wanted to rewrite itself, burn away your atoms and put them back together with his, turning you into something whole, new, and unbreakable. 

He hadn’t called or texted for nearly twenty hours, and caverns in you were opening, ripping themselves wide and turning you into a void that begged to hold him, touch him, love him. You were apprehensive in his hold, nervous of a change in dynamic or passion; he was pale, sick with lack of sleep and eyes heavy with regret. For a moment, you thought this was what losing him felt like, saw him as an apparition of the man you used to covet, until you saw the way your hand on his cheek made a flush break across the skin - your touch alone commanding the flow of his blood. 

You never apologized for the words you both said in the heat of rage, something that only crossed your mind after the soul shaking sex and the quietly wept tears of contrition. 

You never apologized, and you’re sure you didn’t need to. Not really. Words as weapons held little power when the touch of his skin against yours was atomic, burning their residue away through the sheer act of love and forgiveness. 

~~~~

The day you married him you thought of cycles, circles and revolutions of pining for a thing that was yours and, likely, was always yours.

You thought of the day you met him, when first heard him laugh over a sea of noise and the worship of false realities. You thought of how he smiled at you, then, as though he were taking the whole of your soul into his body to keep you, learn you, remember you always. 

You thought of how he kissed you, how he always kisses you - first with his heart and then with his mouth, giving you love always before lust, and never letting you break from him before he’s had his fill. 

You thought of how he fights you, passionately and adamantly, arguing only because he cares too much - about you, about loving you, about every detail of the world you’ve built together with him, and caring little else for the excess in between. 

You thought of how you love him, with fragments and pieces of your body you think you never had, yet are born daily just because you wake up next to him. He births these things from you, creates them every time he touches your skin, every time he presses his lips to your mouth, your hair, your shoulder.

Always, you think you cannot love him more than this.

Always, you are proven wrong.


End file.
